Bottle Rocket

Newt Gingrich’s turn.

For Gingrich, everything is ponderable, particularly the imponderables.Credit Illustration by Robert Risko

It was a sunny Monday in mid-December when Newt Gingrich arrived in the cafeteria of L-3 Warrior Systems, in New Hampshire. Because the company is technologically sophisticated, labor-intensive, military-affiliated, and close to the Manchester airport, it is an enticing venue for Presidential candidates. In honor of Gingrich’s visit, the tables had been removed, and the chairs were lined up in rows. A few months earlier, a Gingrich visit might not have required any rearrangement of the furniture: in June, after a slow and frustrating start to the campaign, most of his top staffers quit, and pundits couldn’t believe that Gingrich didn’t have the sense to quit, too. But in October, after a series of feisty debate performances, his poll numbers started improving; in late November he was endorsed by the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest newspaper; and by the time he arrived at L-3 Warrior Systems he was leading in the national polls. He was thrilled by his comeback, though not surprised. “I’m now, I think by a big margin, the front-runner,” he said, and he passed a pleasant half hour telling the assembled employees and reporters about his plans to debate President Obama into ignominy, thereby clearing the way for a transformative Gingrich Administration.

Gingrich has been a national political figure for more than thirty years, although he sees himself as a historian. He has a Ph.D. from Tulane, and was a history and environmental-studies professor at West Georgia College in the nineteen-seventies; he still has a knack, common to effective teachers, for making his listeners feel smart for keeping up with his train of thought. He speaks in a soft tenor, often tucking his chin and leaning toward his interlocutor—if he wore glasses, he would be constantly peering over them. When he arrived in Washington, in 1979, he was a new kind of Southern conservative. He represented Georgia’s Sixth District, the wealthiest in the state, and he combined the expected denunciations of the “corrupt liberal welfare state” with unexpected paeans to the emancipatory powers of information technology and galactic exploration. In 1984, Gingrich published a manifesto, “Window of Opportunity,” which has on its cover a space shuttle and a bald eagle; its author is advertised as “Chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus.” The preface, by the science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, declared, “It’s raining soup, and Newt Gingrich has the blueprints for soup bowls.”

A less original politician, or a humbler one, might have assumed that fierce partisan invective was incompatible with futuristic policy proposals. But Gingrich saw that these two kinds of provocation, combined, could form the basis of a crafty political strategy: the more sharply he criticized liberalism, the more freedom he had to depart from conservative orthodoxy. He described himself as a leader of a band of nuanced partisans. “We’re post-New Deal conservatives, not anti-New Deal conservatives,” he said.

Even by Washington standards, Gingrich was a rough infighter. He assailed the first President Bush for raising taxes, and, through ruthless maneuvering and a brilliant reinvention of congressional fund-raising practices, he engineered a Republican takeover of Congress: in 1995, he became the first Republican Speaker of the House in almost half a century. He presided over four tempestuous but productive congressional sessions—he was, he says, “fortunate” to be paired with President Clinton, and they collaborated to reform welfare and to balance the federal budget. But by 1998, when he announced his resignation, Gingrich had alienated many of his Republican allies, and his personal unpopularity probably hurt the Party in that year’s elections. When he returned to the campaign trail, after a highly remunerative decade in private life, he seemed remarkably unchanged: he is now sixty-eight, but he speaks and thinks with the same itchy impatience that charmed and horrified Washington in the nineteen-eighties.

When Gingrich finished his speech at L-3, he took a few questions and then allowed himself to be set upon by reporters. Someone asked about a recent statement from Mitt Romney, the protean former governor of Massachusetts, and a founder of Bain Capital, the private-equity firm. Ever since the race began, Romney has been the favorite, although he hasn’t inspired too much favor; the number of Republicans who expect him to win the nomination surely dwarfs the number who want him to win it. A few hours earlier and a few miles away, at a homespun Manchester restaurant called Chez Vachon, which is known for its poutine, Romney had criticized Gingrich for accepting nearly two million dollars in consulting fees from Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage company. Romney said that Gingrich was part of the “Washington crowd of insiders,” and he agreed when the interviewer suggested that Gingrich return the money.

As Gingrich listened to a reporter explaining Romney’s latest affront, he smiled like a boy about to unwrap a Christmas present. “I would just say that if Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, that I would be glad to then listen to him,” Gingrich said.

Like many of Gingrich’s best lines, this one was pithy and, upon examination, somewhat puzzling. In buying and restructuring ailing companies, hadn’t Romney practiced precisely the sort of creative destruction that markets demand and conservatives celebrate? If Bain’s profits were illegitimate, which other corporate profits might be illegitimate, too? Never mind: as members of the media were busy turning the Romney-Gingrich feud into the day’s big story, the candidate was speeding south to Hollis, where he was scheduled to make an appearance at a local pharmacy. There he took some questions in front of a Yankee Candle display and examined a pair of parrots. Gingrich has retained his childhood fascination with animals; in his recent book “A Nation Like No Other,” he includes zoos in his list of “civic-minded institutions” that make America great. He headed to the parking lot, shaking hands and accepting encouragement, while ignoring a man who was pressing him about his Israel policy. A few days earlier, Gingrich had referred dismissively to the “invented Palestinian people”; it was hard to tell whether this was loose talk or a dramatic diplomatic stratagem or both.

A talent for provocation has served Gingrich well in this tumultuous primary race. In the Twitter era, which demands a constant stream of micro-stories, old-fashioned television debates are crucial plot devices, helping to exalt and then debase a series of temporary front-runners. Gingrich likes debates so much, and does so well in them, that he sometimes seems to view debating as an end in itself. If nominated, he says, he will challenge President Obama to a series of seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, each three hours long, with no moderator. He usually gets a few laughs by stipulating that he will allow Obama to use a teleprompter.

A few hours after he left the pharmacy, Gingrich appeared onstage at St. Anselm College, in Manchester, to discuss foreign policy with one of his rivals, Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah. Huntsman, who was the Obama Administration’s first Ambassador to China, strikes many liberals as the kind of conservative that conservatives should like, which helps explain why many conservatives don’t much like him. In his long answers, it was sometimes unclear how a Huntsman Administration would differ from the one he used to serve.

Asked about the Arab Spring, Huntsman cautioned prudence. “You can’t force history,” he said. “I mean, the Speaker knows that, as a great historian.” (This title—the Speaker, or Mr. Speaker—is Gingrich’s for life, and it fits.) Assessing the possibility that Pakistan might implode, Huntsman said, “The turmoil in South Asia would be imponderable.”

For Gingrich, though, everything is ponderable, particularly the imponderables. “We actually need to have a national conversation, and a national dialogue, about creating a strategy for all of radical Islamism,” he said, making an age-old political dodge sound bold and decisive. He also accused the Obama Administration of “a willful denial of reality on a scale that is breathtaking.” When the discussion was over, Gingrich was grandiloquent on the subject of his own grandiloquence. He said, “I think people who look at the totality of this dialogue will agree that it’s probably as sophisticated and as candid a discussion of America in the world as you’ve seen in any recent Presidential campaign.”

Starting in the spring, a series of candidates—Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain—briefly harnessed the insurgent political energy that revivified the Republican Party after Obama’s election. That energy, expressed in a loose network of Tea Party groups and like-minded liberty organizations, helped Republicans sweep the 2010 elections, but it has also helped keep the primary field unsettled. Voters evidently want an outsider, but no one can say precisely what “outsider” means. The term seems available to anyone who can challenge the slick, well-funded candidacy of Mitt Romney, even though Romney’s only experience in political office was his four-year tenure in Massachusetts.

At first glance, Gingrich appears to be the unlikeliest outsider in the pack. For two decades, he was one of the most skillful players in Washington, and his passion for big projects has always coexisted uneasily with his professed hostility to big government. In the nineteen-eighties, he called for “dozens of government-encouraged and subsidized efforts to build the information system of the future,” and he now wants the government to help fund “breakthroughs in brain science.” During the first, disastrous months of his campaign, he criticized Republican plans for Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering,” then, two days later, reversed himself. He was also hurt by the revelation, however inane, that he had recently owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Tiffany, the jewelry company. After the mass resignations, in June, some former staffers complained that Gingrich took a Greek cruise with his wife, Callista, when he should have been campaigning. He seemed washed out, and insufficiently attuned to his party’s truculent mood. But the role of underdog suited him well: the Speaker kept on speaking, hiring the upstart organizers he could afford, and by the time Cain suspended his candidacy, in early December, Gingrich had assembled a small but spirited campaign staff and a growing number of supporters.

In New Hampshire, Gingrich’s campaign manager is Andrew Hemingway, an ebullient social-media entrepreneur who was only twelve when Gingrich became Speaker. Hemingway is now twenty-nine, and the grinding demands of running an understaffed campaign seem only to intensify his good cheer. He was hired on October 21st, just in time to help Gingrich’s poll numbers rise, and he spends his days in the campaign’s scruffy storefront in downtown Manchester, surrounded by the usual campaign detritus: soda bottles, coffee cups, cold pizza. Hemingway is more familiar with Gingrich the speechmaker than with Gingrich the arm-twister. He said he initially doubted that Gingrich would make a great candidate but always knew that Gingrich would make a great President.

Hemingway talked about “leadership,” a way of acknowledging the gap between what voters think they want and what Gingrich thinks they should want. Most voters have probably never heard of Lean Six Sigma, the business-management theory, but they may find themselves nodding when Gingrich promises to use it to streamline and strengthen the military. “I think he’s one of the very few candidates who’s actually bringing new ideas to the table,” Hemingway said. “You may call them ‘zany.’ ” This had been Romney’s derisive judgment; in Hemingway’s view, it was not a fatal insult, and perhaps not an insult at all.

Before going to work for Gingrich, Hemingway was chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, which supports small-government candidates in state elections. Within the quirky and extraordinarily well-informed New Hampshire electorate, liberty voters are an important constituency, and for many of them the obvious choice for 2012 is Ron Paul, the septuagenarian Texas maverick who describes himself as the “champion of liberty” (and, more prosaically, the representative of Texas’s Fourteenth Congressional District). Hemingway, who considers himself a conservative, not a libertarian, says that many of his former allies are dismayed by his new job. “I get e-mails regularly about ‘Newt Gingrich doesn’t respect the Constitution,’ ” he said. To the minimalists in the liberty movement, there is nothing seductive about Gingrich’s eclectic conservatism—his eagerness to transform the federal government suggests, to them, that he likes it too much.

Still, a Republican in New Hampshire must reckon with the liberty voters, and, after the debate with Huntsman, Gingrich gave a speech to the Southern N.H. 9.12 Project. Founded earlier this past year, the group is one of many inspired by Glenn Beck, the former Fox News star, who wanted citizens to rediscover the patriotism and faith that sustained them on the day after 9/11. The venue, a high-school auditorium, was packed with seven hundred local residents; three hundred more were squeezed into a room down the hall. Gingrich, revelling in his front-runner status, began by noting that, only hours after the Chez Vachon incident, Romney had forsworn negative campaigning. Gingrich commended his rival and announced that he would reciprocate.

The host was Ken Eyring, a software engineer who co-founded this 9.12 group. Eyring is earnest, polite, and so soft-spoken that attendees kept shouting for him to move closer to the microphone. For Eyring, political engagement means paying cool-blooded attention to matters of civil and economic liberty, and he helped his group compile a thirty-four-page document that lists the candidates’ positions on sixty-three issues of interest to voters with similar concerns. The document affirms that Gingrich doesn’t fit easily onto a spreadsheet. On the question of support for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, his position is described, not unfairly, as “yes and no.”

Gingrich gave a short stump speech, which earned a series of ovations, then answered questions from local residents and activists. Donna Mauro, a state representative, asked Gingrich if he agreed that states had the right to unilaterally nullify federal statutes, such as the ones in Obama’s health-care bill.

Gingrich didn’t quite agree, but it scarcely mattered, to him or to the crowd, because he so obviously enjoyed the chance to conduct an impromptu history seminar:

I think, if you go back and look, Jefferson and Madison did not actually follow up on nullification as a theory, once they became President and Secretary of State. . . . I think you could end up in a genuine crisis if a state interposed itself and said, “We will not permit the federal government to implement Obamacare.” My hunch, intellectually, is it would be very hard to sustain that, if you were a state.

He said he had a better idea: strike down the plan through the legislature. “I would ask the Congress, as soon as they come in on January 3rd, to stay in session, and to repeal Obamacare, so it’s available for me to sign and repeal the day I’m sworn in,” he said. The crowd cheered.

This is Gingrich at his most persuasive: a Washington veteran who shares the insurgents’ appetite for ancient history and aggressive politics. He earned one of the night’s warmest responses by proposing that drug tests be mandatory for anyone receiving federal assistance—in essence, a small-government rationale for state surveillance. The audience applauded again when he answered a question about the creeping influence of Islam by promising to keep sharia law out of American courtrooms, possibly by “rebalancing the judicial branch,” which might involve impeaching recalcitrant judges or abolishing their courts.

When the town-hall meeting was over, well-wishers and autograph seekers rushed the stage, and the Speaker was joined by his wife; they signed whatever was handed them. A woman thrust forward a pocket-size copy of the Constitution. “I’m sorry, it’s just the Constitution,” she said. “But what better thing for you to sign?”

Gingrich has a talent for creating temporary allies and lifelong enemies. During this campaign, his former House colleagues have been more likely to denounce him than to endorse him. And his rise in the polls inspired National Review to urge Republican voters to reject him, citing “his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas.”

The Gingrich comeback also galvanized his rivals. A few days after suggesting that Romney return some of the money he earned at Bain Capital, Gingrich recanted, acknowledging that his criticism of Romney’s business career “made no sense.” But pro-Romney political-action groups in Iowa had already begun a merciless advertising campaign. Gingrich was depicted as an unprincipled opportunist (during his Speakership, he was fined three hundred thousand dollars for ethics violations), and possibly a centrist in disguise. Some of the advertisements used footage from a 2008 environmental message in which Gingrich sat on a couch beside Nancy Pelosi, then the Democratic Speaker of the House, and said, “Our country must take action to address climate change.” Gingrich had neither the money nor the staff to launch an aggressive counterattack. Instead, he cast himself, however improbably, as a cheerful idealist, fighting the “negative smear campaigns” of big-money politics.

Nevertheless, the onslaught worked. A week after his appearance at L-3, Gingrich’s national lead had all but vanished: Romney was still the leader in New Hampshire, and polls showed Gingrich in third place in Iowa, behind Romney and Paul, who had, by media consensus, replaced Gingrich as the hot candidate. In downtown Manchester, Andrew Hemingway’s Facebook feed was full of exultant Paul supporters celebrating their candidate’s long-awaited surge. “You knew the race was going to tighten,” Hemingway said.

Just before Christmas, Republican officials announced that the Gingrich campaign had submitted too few verified signatures in Virginia, his home state, which meant that he wouldn’t be on the ballot there. This seemed to confirm some people’s worst suspicions about the freewheeling Gingrich campaign—and, by extension, the hypothetical Gingrich Administration. Newer polls suggested that Gingrich had fallen to fourth in Iowa, behind Rick Santorum, the “faith and family” candidate. Soon Eyring and the Southern N.H. 9.12 Project had booked their second major event of the campaign: a speech by Santorum, scheduled for early January.

As Gingrich’s poll numbers became ever more dispiriting, a small band of his undeterred supporters—four of them—gathered one morning in Bedford, New Hampshire, on a triangular patch of concrete near the center of a junction where more than twenty lanes of traffic intersect. They waved “NEWT 2012” signs at passing cars and tried to drink their Dunkin’ Donuts coffee while it was still tepid. One of the volunteers was a fifty-three-year-old woman named Laura Condon, who was campaigning before work. There were Romney placards lining the road, but she wasn’t impressed. “They just plastered all these signs, but these are paid campaigners,” she said, and then she flinched—a large truck was honking its approval. (There seemed to be a rough correlation between the size of a vehicle and the likelihood that it would emit a friendly honk.) “We’re activists here in New Hampshire,” she said. “This is our state sport—this is our Olympics.”

A car drove by, and a college-age man leaned out the passenger side and shouted, “Rawnpawl!” The Gingrich people turned to look at him and then smiled at each other as the car disappeared.

Condon said she didn’t support all of Gingrich’s ideas but hoped that he would re-reform the health-care industry with an eye toward rewarding personal responsibility. Gingrich supporters have a curious tendency to justify their support by mentioning policies he hasn’t yet advocated. Another woman, a volunteer in his office, expressed her hope that he might one day consider her idea to drive drug dealers out of business through the formation of a federal drug-dealing cartel.

Traditionally, politicians fire their supporters’ imaginations by leaving plenty of blank space. Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In” meant whatever people wanted it to mean. But Gingrich’s wide-ranging interests and policy proposals seem to have a similar effect: they inspire people to believe that he might also be open to whatever ideas they have. The negative advertisements in Iowa were devastating, because they punctured this illusion, depicting the fearless thinker as merely one more dealmaking politician. Nationally, his poll numbers were still high, but if the ads worked in Iowa they could work everywhere else, too.

Skip Murphy is the proprietor of Granite Grok, an impish and influential conservative blog. He had originally endorsed Herman Cain, and although he hadn’t officially endorsed any of the remaining candidates, he said he could understand Gingrich’s appeal. “I consider him to be an idea venture capitalist,” he said. “Out of ten ideas, five will be duds, two will be O.K., two will be pretty good, and one will be really good.” In this formulation, the really-good-ness of the tenth idea, along with the modest utility of the four runners-up, outweighs the potential dangers of all the duds.

Hemingway, too, sees this trial-and-error approach as one of the Speaker’s greatest strengths. He says, “I think what you have in Newt Gingrich is a leader who’s going to say, ‘ Hey, look, here’s an idea. Do you guys want this? No? O.K., fine. Here’s another idea. Do you want this? No? O.K., fine. Here’s another idea. Do you want it? O.K., let’s do it.’ ”

Unable to match either Romney’s money or Paul’s young fan club, the Gingrich campaign had to rely even more on its candidate and his ability to generate news and enthusiasm. When he flew back into Manchester from Des Moines recently, Gingrich looked exuberant, even though he had already spent a gruelling morning in Iowa, shadowboxing with negative advertisements. He was talking to one of his supporters on a cell phone. “I am having the time of my life,” he said, and he seemed to mean it.

He was in town for a speech at the Radisson Hotel, where his words were sharper than they had been when he was surging. “I have to confess, the Iowa race has gotten to be a real mess,” he said. Despite his pledge to remain positive, he couldn’t resist drawing some contrasts. “The Des Moines Register, which is a liberal newspaper, endorsed the correct person for a liberal newspaper,” he said, referring to Romney. “The Union Leader, which is a conservative newspaper, endorsed the right person for conservatives.” He asked how many people in the room had fled liberal Massachusetts and its tax rates—and, by tenuous extension, the kinds of policies Romney favors. A few dozen hands went up, and Gingrich said he might hold a New Hampshire rally specifically for refugees from Massachusetts.

Under fire, Gingrich has been emphasizing his conservative credentials. He has boasted of helping persuade Ronald Reagan to embrace supply-side economics, and he recently won an endorsement from Arthur Laffer, the influential economist who advised Reagan. Certainly he is the only candidate in the field who is experienced enough—and audacious enough—to claim credit both for Clinton’s balanced budgets and for Reagan’s unbalanced ones.

For all his talk of overarching visions and fundamental transformations, Gingrich tends to explain and vigorously defend his ideas piecemeal: his conservative vision values his own sensibility above all. Rivals accuse him of centrism, but sometimes he even outflanks the professional outflankers. His call for “rebalancing” the judiciary to remove “anti-American” judges was described by Bill O’Reilly as “a direct threat on the Supreme Court.” Rush Limbaugh conceded, with a fond chuckle, that the plan was “a bit radical.”

For a brief moment during the campaign, Gingrich’s confounding approach seemed perfectly suited to the current, confounding political moment. Republicans have no clear consensus on foreign policy, and they still haven’t decided how to integrate the agenda of the small but noisy liberty movement. The term “conservative” is now claimed by such a wide range of politicians that it can seem bleached of meaning. Though liberals love to mock conservatives’ alleged narrow-mindedness, the truth is that today’s conservatives are united in their opposition to the Obama agenda, and not a whole lot else. Hemingway, who has no choice but to stay optimistic, talked about a politician he knows who is “hesitant” about going public with his support, partly because of Gingrich’s long—and therefore unsavory—tenure in Washington. He thinks that some of Gingrich’s votes will come from hesitant supporters, and that is fine with him. He says, “I think there are so many people like that, who are going, like, ‘Ultimately, we’re going to vote for Newt. But I’m going to plug my nose when I do it.’ Dude, I don’t fuckin’ care. O.K.!”

Gingrich is too idiosyncratic to fit anyone’s idea of the ideal candidate. In his own view, America is unlucky to have big problems and lucky to have him. He promises that, with bold ideas, we can leave the grubby old politics behind; his bet is that voters will feel adventurous enough to give him a try. If they don’t, it won’t be because they have rejected his philosophy, or even his long legacy of political achievements—it will be because they have rejected him. There is, in the end, a smallness about Gingrich’s expansive political philosophy: it has room for him and not much else. If the campaign withers away, and the Speaker returns to private life, then his movement will wither away, too—there can be no Gingrichism without Gingrich. ♦